1. Technical Field
Aspects of the disclosure relate to identifying language of text in a handheld electronic device.
2. Background Information
Generating text in a handheld electronic device examples of which include, for instance, personal data assistants (PDA's), handheld computers, two-way pagers, cellular telephones, text messaging devices, and the like, has become a complex process. This is due at least partially to the trend to make these handheld electronic devices smaller and lighter in weight. A limitation in making them smaller has been the physical size of the keypad if the keys are to be actuated directly by human fingers. Generally, there have been two approaches to solving this problem. One is to adapt the ten digit keypad indigenous to mobile phones for text input. This requires each key to support input of multiple characters. The second approach seeks to shrink the traditional full keypad, such as the QWERTY keyboard by doubling up characters to reduce the number of keys. In both cases, the input generated by actuation of a key representing multiple characters is ambiguous. Various schemes have been devised to disambiguate inputs from these multi-character keys.
A problem exists with regard to handheld electronic devices that have a full keypad or a reduced keypad in that the device cannot always accurately identify language of received text since a number of languages share the same encoding. As such, the potential exists for processing errors in the handheld electronic device in determining the identity of the language of the e-mail. If the handheld electronic device cannot accurately identify the language of the e-mail, the characters of the e-mail may be improperly displayed to the end-user or the handheld electronic device may add linguistic objects of the e-mail to the wrong list of commonly used linguistic objects that are used from the list for disambiguation.